A Major Blackout Hits Chile, Leaving Millions Without Power (apnews.com) 27
A massive blackout has hit Chile, leaving millions without power and disrupting transportation, businesses, and essential services across 14 of the country's 16 regions. The Associated Press reports: The National Electrical Coordinator, Chile's grid operator, said a disruption had occurred in a high-voltage transmission line that carries power from the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to the capital of Santiago in the country's central valley. It did not say what actually caused the disruption that pushed much of the country's power grid into shutdown, from the northernmost Chilean port of Arica to the southern Los Lagos agricultural region.
Interior Minister Carolina Toha said hospitals, prisons and government buildings were switching on backup generators to keep essential equipment operating. In a press conference, Toha urged the public to stay calm and said officials were racing to put the grid back in operation and restore electric service across the country of some 19 million people. "It's affecting the entire electrical system of the country," she said of the breakdown in the 500-kV backbone transmission line. Toha said if all areas didn't return to normal by sunset the government would take emergency measures to avert a crisis. [...]
Videos on social media from all over Chile, a long ribbon of a country stretching 4,300 kilometers (over 2,600 miles) along the southern Pacific coast, showed chaos at intersections with no functioning traffic lights, people having to use their mobile phones as torches in the underground metro and police dispatched to help evacuate office buildings.
Interior Minister Carolina Toha said hospitals, prisons and government buildings were switching on backup generators to keep essential equipment operating. In a press conference, Toha urged the public to stay calm and said officials were racing to put the grid back in operation and restore electric service across the country of some 19 million people. "It's affecting the entire electrical system of the country," she said of the breakdown in the 500-kV backbone transmission line. Toha said if all areas didn't return to normal by sunset the government would take emergency measures to avert a crisis. [...]
Videos on social media from all over Chile, a long ribbon of a country stretching 4,300 kilometers (over 2,600 miles) along the southern Pacific coast, showed chaos at intersections with no functioning traffic lights, people having to use their mobile phones as torches in the underground metro and police dispatched to help evacuate office buildings.
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Dude. Seriously. Stop using logic and just get with the agenda already.
Jezuz.
Re:All eggs in one basket (Score:5, Funny)
Wait. You have eggs? And enough for a basket? :-)
Re: All eggs in one basket (Score:1)
Why don't you dipshits go voluntarily extinct and zero out your carbon footprints?
Re: All eggs in one basket (Score:2)
While my body decomposes, it emits carbon dioxide, so I'll take the planet-preserving path and live some more.
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Nobody should be eating any eggs at all. [peta.org]
Reading that makes me sad. No chickens should grow into an environment like that. I'm going to start doing my part, I'm going to start eating more eggs to prevent more chickens from having to live in such a scenario!
Every egg eaten is a chicken saved from a life of misery!
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You have a basket?
Re: All eggs in one basket (Score:1)
I weaved it myself. Underwater.
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There is already no alternative to electricity in our civilization. Personal transportation is the least concern if the workplace, school, hospital, train infrastructure, airports... don't have electricity to run their services. This includes disruption in delivery of liquid combustibles to local deposits, since no modern economy runs commerce without electricity.
Convergence to electricity enables to supplement your energy from several sources. This can include liquid combustibles if you expect an interrupt
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Good news that nobody at all has ever considered banning them.
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You can technically produce electricity by hand. Try making gasoline by hand, the amount of glassware you need in your lab will set you back far more than a new car.
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Now imagine you live in a country where there's no gas, no alternatives to electricity.
While you imagine that, I'm imaging a country where you have no oxygen. One is as likely as the other and speaks of a mind where electrical power is ubiquitous and reliable. I worked in a remote area where electrical power was available only sporadically for a few hours twice a week The water still ran. The toilets flushed. The food didn't spoil. I still got to work every day and relaxed every night. Quite enjoyable actually - I could hear people actually thinking for themselves instead of right or left win
checking the facts (Score:2)
https://app.electricitymaps.co... [electricitymaps.com]
so looking to all data from this site, since 2017 until now, they have increase the diversity of energy sources!... in 2017, 70% or less of the energy was "unknown", that we can assume either coal or petrol based fuel (can also be other, like hydro storage, but suspect it is not) , and 30% or less from hydro (we even have a 48% one year later)... wind and solar had less than 10% (yes, more than 100%, but looking to peak output). Now, they have 47% of the same "unknown", 42
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Renewables help keep the grid up and stable, and help recover it if it does go down.
By being distributed, renewables are less likely to be affected by local disasters. That makes it easier to segment the grid in the event of a failure, and keep parts of it working instead of the whole thing going down.
Many of them don't need any help to get restarted either - fossil and nuclear plants need a lot of energy to restart, which typically means another power plant has to be online to bootstrap them. Renewables ca
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I think if some major portion of infrastructure was inoperable in the US, we'd also see millions of black outs. Hypothetically if the Pacific DC Intertie [wikipedia.org] went down, I think 1-30 million people would be without power. Parts of L.A. might be able to run off Path 27 as a backup, but it's no where need the capacity (2400 MW vs 3.1 GW). In practice, the entire PDCI wouldn't go out, we'd just have sections of it disconnected and other portions operating usefully. Now if our terrain was more mountainous with fewer
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I know for a fact that my gas furnace will not ignite without electricity. Nor will my inline gas water heater. The car will work for a while but the gas station uses electricity to pump gasoline from the underground tanks. I do believe our gas stove will work if I light it with a match. The oven is electric because that works much better than gas ovens. I do have a solar powered light that can recharge a phone, so I suppose that will keep working.
Atacama Desert (Score:2)
Atacama Desert?
Isn't that where the Nazca lines are?
It must of been Aliens...
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You might be thinking of the Atacama Giant [wikipedia.org]. The Nazca lines are in Peru.
One person who studied Nazca (and Stonehenge) was Gerald Hawkins [the-independent.com], but his obituary has some skepticism:
the fact that a skilled and knowledgeable astronomer today, equipped with all elaborations of modern understanding, can devise a way to use Stonehenge as an observatory or calculator does not in itself prove that was its original use and purpose. Stonehenge, if you made the right observations or moved the stones about in the right way, could be used nowadays to predict the opening hours at Salisbury Museum, or of Sainsbury's in Swindon.
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Maria Reiche studied the Nazca Lines for over half a century. She found that after accounting for precession many of the lines could be dated pretty closely. Alignments indicating the equinoxes seemed quite important, an emphasis found earlier at Chavin and later in the Inca as well. There are "chairs" carved into the bedrock scattered throughout the Andes, very narrow so the observer is constrained to one exact space. Stars of interest such as Sirius rise or set exactly at the valley between two mounta
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Nah, it was the fault of the Biden administration. Or Obama. Or a DEI hire.
Hey, if it works in the US...
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Isn't that where the Nazca lines are?
Did someone cut the Nazca lines? That must be the cause.
Well, that sucks (Score:1)
not so good for the Chilean Internet (Score:1)
thank god the officials are hard at work! (Score:3)
There are definitely zero officials doing any "racing" here. There is absolutely nothing any official can do besides stay out of the way. Well, maybe they can clear a few red-tape "roadblocks" and help keep OTHER "officials" out of the way while the linemen and engineers work to restore the grid. Those are the true heroes here, and you can count on them getting far less recognition than they deserve for their efforts under very difficult, dangerous, and stressful conditions.
I wonder what sort of cold-start capabilities they have in Chile? The other deep question is what sort of communications do the engineers have right now? A cold start is difficult enough with good communications, and having communications (like cell phones) down seems like it would make the process so much slower going.
Hopefully they have more than one black-start-capable power facility, and have a comprehensive and rehearsed black-start procedure. We saw how it went recently with Puerto Rico, maybe some lessons were learned? Those lessons are best learned by observing OTHERS handing the same problem.